Did Brendan Blumer (EOS) just say Bitcoin is an ICO at NYC FinTech?! Not quite, but sounds about right!steemCreated with Sketch.

I finally had a chance to meet Brendan Blumer (CEO of block.one / EOS) in person yesterday at the NYC Fintech Conference, where he made a short yet pointed keynote speech discussing "EOS: The Era of the DACs". You can watch it below (it begins nearly 3 hours in, at 2:59:30):

What I found interesting from many of the questions he received afterwards, is that many people still just don't quite get. It was even more interesting to watch the "heated discussion" and twitter spat that took place over the statement he made around 3:09:50:

"Bitcoin and Ethereum are the largest ICOs that exist today. Bitcoin is taking in $8 Million a day, and Ethereum is taking in about $6 Million. We are burning every single resource that people are giving to us."

If you understand what he is saying, he is clearly making a highly valid conceptual comparison, although quite a few on twitter and telegram seemed more interested in "calling him out" as a scammer over minor semantics. I suppose we also know where their money's tied up!

And to clarify, conceptually, bitcoin is like an ICO, and so is ethereum...

EOS: "initial coins" are mined to "raise funds" for centralized platform and community development.

In both cases, resources are going toward centralized entities. Except that EOS is actually trying to build a better mousetrap with all those monetary "resources". What exactly are the bitcoin and ethereum miners trying to build? Instead of wasting energy mining, block.one and EOS are mining "development" instead.

And for those claiming the people behind the EOS ICO are "greedy"... what does greed have to do with it? The market sets the price. Those who think it's worth less, stop buying it! If someone thinks it's worth more, should EOS "politely decline" the extra "monetary resources"? And as far as investments go, maybe I own a few, maybe I don't. I won't recommend EOS one way or the other, except to say that "I get what they're doing, and it has great potential". Furthermore, just as with STEEMIT, where one needn't invest a dime more than the time you probably already waste on facebook, there are many ways to "invest" in EOS beyond merely "buying tokens".

I'll point people towards what I find "interesting", but I've learned long ago that "stock tips" almost never end well. It's up to each of us to "pick our poison". And I'll guarantee you that if I told people I'm "loading the boat on STEEM" while it's at 10 cents (based on my risk criteria and time horizon), there will be some bozo who will come back hating me later, crying how my "advice" got them 100% long STEEM at $3 bucks for a short-term trade, and now they're sitting on a 60% long-term capital loss.

And just as there's no guarantee that investments will work out as you expect, there is not even a presumption that miners will reinvest any new coins in the "best interest" of the bitcoin or ethereum communities as a whole. How many miners do you hear about "working hard" to include "low-fee" transactions in their mined blocks? And of course, there's no guarantee those behind EOS will do what they promise either. I would, however, highly recommend you check out the quality of the code and documentation that's being released almost daily on the EOS github. It appears they may even be taking on a complete rewrite of the underlying graphene engine as well.

If you look at the histories of the individuals behind EOS, and realize the potential of the real world blockchain applications they have already successfully built, well... One must wonder why all current blockchains aren't aspiring to achieve such high level of performance, instead of fighting over minor incremental boosts in productivity and performance. However, I digress...

Who is Brendan Blumer?

We are all aware of @dan's credentials with bitshares and steemit. And Brendan has a rather interesting history of his own. Frankly, what I was most surprised with Brendan (and I hinted this to him straight out), why can't I follow you on STEEMIT?! He does post on medium, and tweet on twitter, so why is he not sharing his insights on STEEMIT as well, and trading more on bitshares, and really getting the point across that this is version 3.0 of this amazing technology. EOS is the "game changer" that can potentially bring all these dapps together under one roof with a better "governance" framework, inter-operable at high-speed and with high-bandwidth through a combination of parallelism and other means. This morning, Brendan made two posts on the EOS telegram chat that I feel I must share so that you can all appreciate a bit more of what I see here:

Brendan Blumer: I started mining as a segue into Blockchain; in fact at one point I was 10% of the ETH hash power. I spent millions on GPU's and electricity, but added no performance to the network. Since I wasn't one of the mining pools, I was out of the communication loop that was tightly controlled by the decision makers.

I unfortunately witnessed first hand how centralized and inefficient the PoW experiment was, but even more concerning was the amount of capital that was moving into the space under the assumption that they were buying into a decentralized ecosystem that didn't have the same inefficiencies or centralized control mechanisms that they were trying to escape; this is when I began looking into PoS, and eventually DPOS to deliver mainstream performance capabilities.

PoW is hiding behind a guise of "trust in math"; although time and time again we've seen that all blockchains are voting machines and it's just a matter of whether token holders vote for themselves or whether their fate is decided by third parties for them (hash voting).

I'm involved in EOS because there is a better way; DPOS is a proven consensus mechanism with aligned interests and mainstream performance capabilities. EOS's introduction of parallelism makes public blockchains possible at scale and Dan's architecture of a messaging platform opposed to a state machine allow it perform like a traditional operating system - this unlocks infinitely more use cases, massively reduces development times, and lowers the required proficiencies for developers to launch powerful Dapps; if you can build a website, you can build on EOS.

The Bitshares, Steemit, and now EOS community is a diverse community of millions and I believe that when empowered with this technology and institutional grade support, they are going to change the world.

Now that's what I'm talking about! I hope more people see this, and perhaps it clicks for them and they really start to "get it" as well. Just like many of us, Brendan was also frustrated in that the current solutions really don't solve many of the issues they "purport" to solve. And here's what I'll call "Part 2":

Brendan Blumer: Existing PoW chains make the requirements for an individual block producer very low. This creates many nodes all over the world but it results in high costs, extremely low performance, and centralization because hardware and electricity are cheaper in bulk.

Equally consequential is the fact that PoW block producers are the law of the blockchain and vote with hash power to make every network decision; they can do this with no tokens and no consent from token holders, and therefore are not directly affected by the outcome of their votes - this is like UK citizens voting for US government. In fact taxation without representation is what led to the American Revolution and creation of the USA.

Five mining pools control the majority of Bitcoin and Ethereum today with over 51% of votes (hashpower), therefore it continually comes down to a 3/5 vote on network decisions; there is no framework for these decisions and no transparency in the decision making process.

DPOS uses 21 elected block producers that can be voted out at anytime by the token holders if they don't feel they're upholding the constitution. The constitution removes their ability to play arbiter and and makes malicious activity less ambiguous and easier to correct.

DPOS is the most used consensus mechanism for blockchains today and has been running for several years, holding billions in value, and has never been taken down by network congestion or DDOS.

Finally, in conclusion...

Brendan "gets it", @Dan "gets it", @officialfuzzy "gets it", and I like to think I "get it" too, at least to some small degree. That's also why @officialfuzzy just made his way all the way up to NYC to check out the remainder of the FinTech conference.

And that's also why I'm about to go back downtown and meet up with Fuzzy... in NYC!!!

And if I'm really lucky, hopefully Brendan, Fuzzy, Dan, and even little 'ole me can hang out a bit and talk about where we really think all this is going...

Excellent post, thank you! EOS, Bitshares and Steemit (DPOS/Graphene) are the future of blockchain tech; decentralized, efficient, secure, scalable. Dan and Brendan are the Batman and Robin of crypto.... but which one is which? :)

Phase 1, The Minimal Viable Testing Environment, is ahead of schedule, and half of Phase 2, the Minimal Viable Test Network, has also been completed as well.

For the first time, developers will be able to create and deploy a decentralized application and web interfaces without having to worry about bandwidth and storage costs, or even hosting any servers themselves; this enables a host of new innovative decentralized business models, such as a decentralized YouTube, Soundcloud, or other storage-intensive projects.

In addition to computational bandwidth, native EOS.IO software-based blockchain token holders will now have access to free cloud storage, hosting, and download bandwidth via IPFS / HTTPS; this access can be used without consuming or transferring tokens.

Now that the EOS.IO software can be used in distributed network configurations we can benchmark its performance. Our internal testing shows that the software is currently able to sustain over 10,000 single threaded transactions per second on a multi-node network. This puts it on track to support over 1 million transactions per second on machines with over 100 CPU cores.

I had thought of revising that slightly for clarity, but for some reason STEEMIT was giving me a weird "URIError: URI malformed" error when trying to update a few little things in the post (having nothing to do with URIs).

What I'm saying is the programming development is centralized (Brendan mentioned they've hired something like over 30 developers to work on it), and the community building (ie. marketing, promotion, etc) is centralized, with the goal of building the "next generation" decentralized blockchain platform.

Very nice post. I for one cannot contain my level of excitement about EOS but understand the disclaimer of not giving any "hot tips" as we all know how that turns out. It is abundantly clear who has done their homework and who hasn't when dealing with EOS critics. People are scared of new and different. As a small miner I have to be truthful to myself when reflecting on what good is it that I'm doing to "help the cause". In all honesty... how utterly wasteful and inefficient POW is... and what a monster it has grown into. I am very comfortable in stating that EOS is potentially the biggest thing that has happened to blockchain technology. You know that feeling you get when you know something as fact and someone is adamant about taking the opposite stance as you?.. it makes you chuckle to yourself! That's the similar feeling I get when someone talks ill of EOS. Thanks again for the post!

I was a bit surprised that he "liked" my post when I replied it to him as a tweet. I didn't know much of him before this, but the "consensus" increasingly seems to imply that he probably didn't read past the "headline". lol

EOS is one of the most interesting pieces of tech out there. The minute I heard about it was the minute I realized how big blockchain would be in distributed app dev. Why re-invent the wheel when you can just pick a few up for free and start building your own car, bus, train, etc. What we have here is a real sleeper.

Hi @alexpmorris...I feel like "I get it" I really appreciate your posts ...you really break it down...so that it's understandable. ..always with clarifications and detail...I just wanted you to know that I really appreciate the time and effort you put in to help people like me understand :) :) kayleigh

Hi @alexpmorris, I just read your post. Thank you for the information!!
I am sure I have been missing many good posts. It's very difficult and catch up and find the posts I am interested to.
I am with you, fuzzy, Dan and Brendan. :)

I am very impressed with this article and while I am no crypto or tech expert I have been talking for a while about how unsustainable and inefficient the POW system and how much resources it just wastes.

I dunno if I'm "so successful" here (as some might say, you're only as good as your last post! lol)... but I do thank you for your kind words @quinneaker!

Also agree that while POW was very innovative for its time, there really are much better ways of achieving even better results with much greater efficiency, resource utilization, and overall "utility" in general, as Dan so often describes himself.

yes ur only as successful as ur last posts but all ur last posts I saw were very successful!

yes ur article was very well done and something I hope a lot more people realize. I am a sustainability extremist so the whole POW thing is quite gross to me....All those mined parts and all that energy.....
NASTY!

The most sensical thing I've read about EOS in a while.
And when anyone claims EOS to be a scam they should just be pointed to EOS github, it's like watching the matrix unfold...
I wish the whole EOS team a lot of luck and courage on their quest for decentralization!
Keep up the hard work!

This really cool mate, getting to hang with these wonderboys. I think we should really be having a decentralized blockchain.

EOS's introduction of parallelism makes public blockchains possible at scale and Dan's architecture of a messaging platform opposed to a state machine allow it perform like a traditional operating system...*

Always good to learn a bit more about EOS. I didn't know about their ideas for voting mechanisms. I hope it was a good conference, and that you Fuzzy and maybe Brendan and Dan can meet up, discuss some blockchain and have some fun!

No initial coins - no premine, they are mined to EARN money for provable service not RAISE money to do something in future which implies trust, mining pools might get centralized but contributors to mining pools are not - anyone is free to delegate their hash to pools and EARN completely independent money.

mining pools with ASIC's are not a requirement for PoW, but a downside. It couldn't have been further from intent or state for bitcoin for very long time.

mining could've been done by anyone with a computer, then by anyone with gpu, and only later by anyone with ASIC's - so it is permission-less entry by anyone with common consumer equipment.

PoW is not only a distribution mechanism but also a security mechanism -
a real time service for others transacting and rewarded via block-rewards and fees - nobody was selling coins from "initial" premine. Many miners getting paid all separately to pay for electricity costs are not same as single centralized company selling premine even conceptually.

you can't compare money being paid to a centralized company to money being paid to electricity companies. electricity doesn't become elastically more expensive the more people use it at these levels if we are looking at money flow. note how PoW is mathematically provable method to show the work was actually done to secure the blockchain which is where the cost of electricity comes in - it's very solid proof that puts something at stake if trying to be dishonest, ICO's have nothing to secure.

They are stretching definition of initial which even in IPO is equivalent to premine. It doesn't matter in premine if you distribute it slowly or quickly - it's still a premine. They are stretching definition of coin/asset as a place holder token "vaporware" that relies on trust in a company to deliver in future to ones used live to reward for providing real time security in past/present. They are stretching offering from fundraising sale which may be used for buying something by many individuals to earning from a service.

It's fine if you decide to use ICO as long as you acknowledge centralization of funding there, and use a unique ICO model to get good distribution of coins. But lets not lump decentralized crypto like BTC fairly distributed without even intent of profit originally to centralized premined projects like ETH.

EOS has a lot to offer, there's zero reason to make completely wild comparisons like this for what I can only imagine as media attention.

You do not have to find equivalents in other chains - they ARE different. Focus on advantages and disadvantages and what design choices were made.

POW provides very little security, it gets the credit, but ultimately security is comes from the public record of full nodes. POW is a brute force system for deciding who should produce the next block and creates a scarcity of blocks. There are other ways to create scarcity of blocks and therefore POW isn't adding security.

Bitcoin has 21 million initial coins, those initial coins are locked in a smart contract that is distributing them at a a fixed schedule in exchange for payment in hash power. EOS has 1 billion initial coins, those initial coins are locked in a smart contact that is distributing them at a fixed schedule in exchange for payment in ETH which is proof of prior hash power. In fact this proof of prior hash power applies to the ETH crowd sale which took bitcoin as payment.

Claiming that POW adds security is like claiming that increasing what you pay your security guard will increase the security of your home. Beyond a certain point all extra pay is complete waste and adds no security. In fact, the reality is that it is the camera that broadcasts your front door to the entire world gives you security, the guard is just there for show.

Only those who think sunk cost and/or believe in the debunked cost theory of value can claim mining adds value to the token. Only those with no concept of opportunity cost can support POW.

I hope I get this right: In chat he explained further that due to on chain funding and various estimates of how much would be available, development will easily be funded and possibly far far exceed what was collected in the ICO making it very viable to fire malicious funded holder or move against them without concerns for lack of funding like we might see on chains without native on-chain funding mechanisms (e.g. most ico'ed projects like eth) 1 bil evaluation would make up to 50 mil available each year for development, 10 bil - up to 500 mil and so on (<=5%/yr).

This is extremely valuable point to me and reiterates importance of decentralized organizations and funding (DAO or DAC first created on bitshares graphene afaik ~ 2014)

I bought 100 eos and hope that this would change my live in 2 years.. I really think this has the biggest potentional.. I also wrote a post about it some weeks ago.. At least starting in crypto brought me steemit.

These "literal" nitpicks are exactly what I was addressing in the article. Conceptually, it's more or less the same thing, and was meant as a comparison for what can be "done better". He was making an analogy. When you start saying things like "stretching definition of initial", it's merely semantic differences. This is also confirmed by something else Brendan said:

I wish I had the clearance to announce more details now, but soon the EOS community will see how resources can be leveraged to drive real innovation and value.

As for the "vaporware" comparison, and notwithstanding the progress I've witnessed on the EOS github, the vaporware "analogy" could be extended to bitcoin as well. I mean, what is the community really getting for all that money, except for a super expensive way to get things done that should cost a fraction of the price? Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for my "too low fee" bitcoin transaction to go through, back from 2015! I guess at this point it's disappeared from the network and considered an "undesirable transaction".

No one denies the revolutionary impact of bitcoin. But that doesn't mean the tech and the politics couldn't use a dramatic overhaul either. Ford's Model T, or IBM's first PC were also "revolutionary". But at some point it doesn't hurt to rethink everything from the ground up, and devise a fully updated model reflecting updated technical capabilities and usage cases that hadn't even yet been conceived back in 2008. It has gotten me thinking, however, that an IBM-PC-iPhone could be kind of cool, especially if I can lug it behind me in the trunk of my car!

EOS has a lot to offer, there's zero reason to make completely wild comparisons like this for what I can only imagine as media attention.

"Wild comparisons" are rather subjective. Some might say that "EOS has a lot to offer" is a "wild comparison". Anyway, how does anyone come to such conclusions, other than by critically analyzing and comparing what "already is"?

You do not have to find equivalents in other chains - they ARE different. Focus on advantages and disadvantages and what design choices were made.

And how do you focus on the advantages and disadvantages without also comparing what is similar, and what can be done better? If bitcoin works for you, stick with it. If not, well, consider other options, or use both. But personally, I appreciate people who'd rather just say what they think, without worrying about intruding into someone's semantic "safe space".

This is similar to what I recently dealt with in the bitshares community when I gave attention to a problem I deemed rather important. I even spent dozens more hours of my own time developing a potential "fix" for it. If my code passes a thorough peer-review and is eventually accepted, I believe the whole ecosystem, from bitshares, to STEEMIT, and possibly even EOS will benefit in the long-run. Of course, it did seem at first some would prefer to bury their heads and "leave well enough alone". Some of us, however, may feel that's simply just not quite "good enough"...

Trying to understand more about crypto and blockchain. Yet diffuclt to understand every thing, above all in english, but thanks for sharings. Good continuation.
........@permatek - How Silicon Valley discovered LSD

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I read this: "In fact taxation without representation is what led to the American Revolution and creation of the USA." and I think to myself: Taxes are very high in America now, so either the example is wrong are there was something good to this system that it was incorporated in the end.

It's a reflection of "what led to the American Revolution", not so much what's going on now. However, we could say that all the "blockchain activity" going on now, could be largely attributed to "taxation without true representation" by the "powers that be" on a global scale.

What a great discussion you have going here. I am new to cryto and only started learning more about it a couple of weeks ago. I don't recall exactly how I was led here to Steemit, but thank God I'm here. As I am learning more about blockchain from people like yourself, I am beginning to see the great potential it has to really revolutionize the future for the better. However, I was also thinking, in the wrong hands (powers that be), it can also be used to manipulate everything, only to serve the wrong hands even more. I know I am digressing here, but I truly hope for more people with the intention to make this world better place will take over this new wave for blockchains.

Welcome @alexpmorris to Steemit ! Glad to see you. I hope you enjoy your time here, its a great community :) Nice post, i will follow your account, please follow me ! And if you give me upvotos and I'll give it to you too ... And Please help me grow

Hlw @dan really sorry for that but now my life is on last stage because all of my work got punished but sure I don't know how this tag is used ( Eos , bitcoin ) but after I know I am changed this with real tags check my previous post am never try to spam anymore

thanks for the "advice"... and within only hours that you suggested that "soon bitcoin reaches to the sky", bitcoin drops 400+! lol

I do think, however, you may have missed this part of my article...

I'll point people towards what I find "interesting", but I've learned long ago that "stock tips" almost never end well. It's up to each of us to "pick our poison". And I'll guarantee you that if I told people I'm "loading the boat on STEEM" while it's at 10 cents (based on my risk criteria and time horizon), there will be some bozo who will come back hating me later, crying how my "advice" got them 100% long STEEM at $3 bucks for a short-term trade, and now they're sitting on a 60% long-term capital loss.